The present invention relates to conveyors for feeding material preferably of elongated or sheet form.
In prior devices for feeding material in either sheet or web form, it has been found that said sheets might vary in width and also that one web of material may be joined to another web of different width. Such variance in the width of material being fed by a conveyor necessitates a constant adjustment of the conveyor guide means to facilitate the centered passage of the material therethrough. Quite often the adjustment of the guide means was carried out by a hand operation such as by rotating a wheel connected to a suitable screw member which is provided with a nut that is designed to effect the separation or drawing towards one another of the guide means of a feed conveyor structure. In such devices which utilize a hand operated adjusting mechanism, the guide means might be readily separated from one another to facilitate and permit the passage of a web of material therethrough of a certain width, but then when material of a smaller width is being fed through the conveyor, it was quite often done so without any manual adjustment of the guide means so as to move the guide means towards one another to insure that the material is being properly fed on center by the conveyor apparatus. Such a situation occurs quite frequently when the operator of a machine makes an initial adjustment to separate the guide means from one another to permit the passage of a web or sheet of material of certain size through the feed conveyor and then if material of a smaller width is subsequently fed through said conveyor, the guide means are not manually adjusted towards one another so that the material is simply permitted to move through the feed conveyor in a sloppy manner so that the delivery of the material is not carried out in an accurate manner when accuracy of delivery of said material is one of the essential requirements of the feed conveying apparatus.